When you hear executives in the wake of Meaningful Use, they speak of the mountains of time and money they invested in a patient portal only to have the patient not get on board. The reason is simple. Like most health systems, these organizations chose to invest in the patient portal modules available through the EHR vendor. This is largely because most Meaningful Use patient portal decisions were being made by IT, as opposed to business.

At the top of the list in IT decision-making criteria was integration with EHR. As such, executives crossed off the features required via Meaningful Use quite easily. All but one. They forgot to ask the patient what they needed from their provider, and, more importantly, they forgot to adequately make the patient aware of the benefits provided.

It appears as though the “if we build it they will come” concept hasn’t quite held true in the case of patient portal. In fact, the statistics are rather staggering. An article from HealthData Management entitled “Patient Portals Not Yet Go-To Platform for Patients” reveals:

• Almost half of patients don’t even know if their physician has a patient portal
• 11% are confident their physician “does not” offer one
• Less than half of those surveyed – 49.2% – report actually being shown a patient portal by their primary care physician either during a visit or outside a visit

What’s the underlying problem here? The patient portal is the digital front door to telehealth. Patients won’t knock on that door if they do not know where it is and what value lies behind it. Many forgot that it is often not the IT department – the department largely in charge of Meaningful Use and telehealth initiatives – that invests in stores of knowledge on patient experience.

To learn more download our guide, 3 Key Strategies for Telehealth Adoption.

Connected health has become a priority within many healthcare organizations as they begin to realize that patient engagement outside the traditional medical setting can have a positive impact on chronic disease management and treatment compliance. In our latest infographic we take a look at the top 10 connected health trends for 2016.

Want to learn more? Download our complimentary guide, The Definitive Guide to Connected Health 2016!

The healthcare industry has been transformed by government regulations such as Meaningful Use, which require providers to offer electronic health records to patients in an effort to engage and empower patients to be more accountable for their own care. One of the largest providers of healthcare services in the United States sought to innovate and modernize its patient portal to deliver an enhanced experience that goes beyond simple access to records and provides patients the ability to perform such tasks as pre-register for procedures, schedule follow-up appointments, receive education, and pay their bill.

We were asked to help take the patient portal to the next level and provide a highly personalized social experience on a single point of access for applications and customer experience. Integrated data from a variety of source systems allows patients to manage their health from anywhere, while a middleware caching solution built on RESTful APIs improves response time and the overall patient experience with features like find a doctor, make an appointment, bill pay, and sign-up for classes – all from a single view. The intuitive and evolving system meets the needs of facilities, clinicians and patients. The new patient portal has improved patient satisfaction and created a personalized experience while meeting federal guidelines for Meaningful Use criteria.

Opening the Door to Better Care:

• Compliance with the government’s Meaningful Use criteria around record keeping and access
• A unified platform for patient care, increasing patient satisfaction and enhancing overall experience
• Consolidation of many common tasks into one secure, easy-to-use patient portal that allows patients to access and manage their health from anywhere:
  • Find a doctor
  • Make an appointment
  • Sign up for classes and events
  • View details of recent hospital visits
  • View hospital lab results
  • Manage the health of your loved ones
  • Pre-register for procedures
  • View and pay hospital bills

Market-Driven Patient Engagement is just one of the trends we have identified in our Definitive Guide to Connected Health 2016, 10 Trends You Need to Know guide. Download the guide to learn more about this trend and the other 9 trends that are shaping the healthcare industry.

Healthcare organizations, both providers and health plans, continue to feel the pressure to expand access to care, improve quality, and reduce costs. Increasingly empowered patients and members are intensifying this pressure through demands for price transparency, mobile access, and personalized experiences. To meet these demands, it is critical for healthcare organizations to shift their focus to understanding, engaging, and empowering the healthcare consumer. In our guide, The Definitive Guide to Connected Health 2016, we look at the top 10 Connected Health trends for 2016 and provide insights to help healthcare organizations not only survive – but thrive – in the age of consumer-driven healthcare.

The end of Meaningful Use has impacted several trends that will grace us in Connected Health over the coming year. Among these trends we find an increased focus on the clinician experience. The CMS announcement by Slavitt was filled with sentiments such as:

• “…frustration levels are real. Done poorly, measures are divorced from how physicians practice and add to the cynicism that people who build these programs just don’t get it.”
• “…we are committed to building a program that is flexible and adapts around the goals of a provider’s individual practice and population…”
• “We need to introduce a new field of practice improvement science and care delivery science. We need to educate in team-based ways, rather than solitary…”
• “[We need to offer providers the ability to customize] their goals so tech companies can build around the individual practice needs…”

What Slavitt is pointing to here is something we have come to realize in the wake of Meaningful Use: If we cannot gain provider adoption of a technology, then we will not achieve patient adoption either. As developers of technology solutions, we must continually understand that it takes more than meeting a list of business requirements (or meaningful use requirements) for a solution to succeed. A solution can have every feature we ask it to have. However, if a solution fails the user, then the solution has failed. It is as simple (and as difficult) as that.

At the center of all connected health trends you will find organizations that struggle to provide care and services across care paradigms and organizational silos. For that reason, there will remain great demand within the healthcare enterprise for collaboration tools that can be used to unite communities of clinicians that must work efficiently in an environment where complex tasks meet arduous clinical and business processes. Enter the bedrock of clinician experience: a singular gateway into a clinician’s digital work by way of a habit forming, and user centric, enterprise portal.

In light of the ongoing evolution in clinician experience, enterprise collaboration technologies, such as those created for DaVita HealthCare Partners, can be used to help employees interact, form relationships, make decisions, and accomplish synchronized work in real time. These actions drive innovation and the likelihood for success in the new world of healthcare.

• 25% of an employee’s time is spent looking for information
• Knowledge workers spend at least 15-25% of their workday searching for information and only half of the searches return useful information
• 45% of employees use the wrong information to make decisions

Within the connected enterprise, care and education take on fluid new forms that are not confined to geographic boundaries. At their core, you find a focus on not only business requirements but also the stakeholder communication needs across the organization as well as the clinician experience that will provide a foundation for effective two-way communication across the enterprise.

Return in Importance of the Clinician Experience (MU release) is just one of the trends we explore in our new guide, The Definitive Guide to Connected Health 2016: 10 Trends You Need to Know. Download the guide to see where this trend falls and to discover the other Connected Health trends healthcare executives must be aware of. In the guide we also provide insights to help organizations not only survive – but thrive – in the age of consumer-driven healthcare.

Here we have the next trend in the world of Connected Health for 2016. The end of Meaningful Use brought with it the beginning of other trends that will take its place (or perhaps, more accurately, its mind space and investment dollars). Such is the case with the checklist approach to patient engagement that we found under meaningful use, which will be supplanted by a more market driven approach to patient engagement. However, the end of Meaningful Use is also allowing us to shift focus to trends that were in existence but will grow in prominence due to their more long-term approach to managing patient wellness. Such is the case with outcomes based care and the longitudinal, and patient centric, care plans that are inherent thereto. It just so happens, this evolution will end up placing a very strong mark on the patient portal of the future.

Proper care coordination that meets outcomes based goals rests on the power of a longitudinal care plan. This is the plan that all members of a care team, including the patient, can both view and contribute to. As mentioned by Chilmark Research, in the current state, the long-term care plan only exists in theory. As it currently stands, these plans are siloed between facilities and still largely live on paper and within phone discussions. As such, patients have little opportunity for involvement in such a plan.

Enter the Digital Care Plan

At the heart of a care plan rests an important goal. We want to capture data from across an episode of care and, eventually, beyond its typical confines of the brick and mortar and into the “observations of daily living” to provide a full picture of a patient’s wellness and the path needed to maintain and improve wellbeing over the long term. Such a plan will be represented in two parallel paths that will eventually merge:

• Interoperability and the Digital Care Plan: There are currently, and will continue to be, plans under way to integrate data across the care paradigm. This is no easy task as the mergers and acquisitions of the past few years have brought with them a rather complicated mix of data systems. However, over the next few years there will be an effort to digitize the care plan such that care providers can coordinate electronically across an episode of care.
• Connecting the Patient via Portal: The promise of outcomes based care brings with it the ideal of the patient being the most important member of the care team. It is challenging for such to be the case when the patient is not able to contribute to the longitudinal care plan in their own right. In the future we are moving towards a new wave of patient digital engagement seeped in the principles of outcomes based care. This is one where the care plan lives electronically across the care paradigm and, eventually, becomes attached to the patient experience by way of the patient portal.

Needless to say, this trend will be with us for a few years to come as these digitized patient-centric care plans evolve. However, in the meanwhile we can look at health systems that are succeeding at consolidating patient data across the care paradigm and, in tandem, invest in increasing digital engagement with patients. Our fondest examples include New York Health + Hospitals, which has made tremendous investment in understanding their patient data story along with Healthcare Corporation of America that has beaten the odds and created a patient portal for a diverse group of patient populations across the country.

Meaningful Use is Dead; Long Live Outcomes-Based Care is just one of the trends we explore in our new guide, The Definitive Guide to Connected Health 2016: 10 Trends You Need to Know. Download the guide to see where this trend falls and to discover the other Connected Health trends healthcare executives must be aware of. In the guide we also provide insights to help organizations not only survive – but thrive – in the age of consumer-driven healthcare.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Well, it is for We the Connected Health Geeks of Perficient, anyway. It’s that time of year where we indulge our inner trend-spotters and set them loose upon the world of Connected Health. But…this year we are releasing the trends with a bit of a twist. As we role out the Top 10 Connected Health Trends for 2016 we are not going to provide you with our listing of relative order. Instead, we are going put them all out there in the open (shameless and unnumbered). You can download our new guide, The Definitive Guide to Connected Health 2016: 10 Trends You Need to Know to find out what order the ten trends go in!

With that disclosure out of the way…let’s move on to the first trend! Well, this might not actually be the first trend…could be the fourth…or maybe the eighth. All we can say for certain at this point is that this next trend in market-driven patient engagement will be among the top ten movements in the Connected Health world that you should keep your eye on.

Sending the Ghost of Meaningful Use Past Packing

Our first trend drops us here at the beginning of the end of MU2. Let’s be honest, in the wake of the Ghost of Meaningful Use Past, patient centric healthcare technology has left much to be desired. The reason is simple, as discussed in The Meaningful Use Marketing Fail Keeping VPs up at Night, the #1 decision making criterion for patient portal implementation under MU2 was ease of integration with EHR. We built it, and we waited for them to come. As shown in a study by Witteman et al, that I picked up on Chilmark Research, healthcare technologists oftentimes assume that patients have “unlimited enthusiasm” to engage with their health information. Let’s all take a moment to reflect on that faulty assumption. When we think of those technologies in our lives that we truly have unlimited enthusiasm for, I am guessing we would not find systems integration at the root core of their purpose. Why do these technologies actually engage us? Because they were built from us. They considered all of the patterns that are embedded within our everyday lives, they take our motivations into account, and they were built within an experience that then became habit forming for us. In other words, these technologies worked because they were “market driven”.

With Meaningful Use out of the way, we need to move away from prescriptive checklists and towards market driven concerns that have patient engagement at their core. The two most notable are: 1) bending the cost curve, and 2) improving pay for performance outcomes. In both we can use technology to motivate and incentivize healthcare consumer behaviors to meet market driven goals. Plus, by creating solutions that are market based, we will have technology platforms with higher ROI that are truly habit forming and utilize the technologies that are most appropriate for a particular patient population and the providers that care for them. When these technologies are market driven they will be able to meet consumer expectations, survive new reimbursement methods, and create data streams worthy of mining for additional consumer driven insights.

Design Thinking in Healthcare

At the central core of this trend we find a shift away from the meaningful use checklist and towards design thinking in healthcare. What is design thinking? Design thinking flips traditional technology solution development upside down. In the old era we came up with an idea (e.g., Meaningful Use), and solutions were spun around it. Using the design thinking method, the idea is to first identify the users’ needs and then spin off technology solutions from that point.

Before we start throwing technology at patients, we need to understand how to deliver solutions to those with limited enthusiasm for that engagement. Doing this requires an organization to step back and get strategic for a moment. Perficient clients that were market driven well before their time, Florida Blue and Marshfield Clinic among them, put user research at the very foundation of their solution development. They utilized research efforts that helped them understand what their consumers actually wanted (as opposed to throwing a solution at them that told them what they needed). As a result of strategic solution development like this, engagement improves and, by way of Florida Blue’s example, consumers begin bending the cost curve on their own behalf because they were provided with the technological tools they needed in order to do so.

The Market-Driven Patient Portal

Curious about what a market-driven patient portal looks like? Fancy that, we already have a white paper available on the topic. We invite you to check out 7 Features of a Market- Driven Patient Portal and post any questions or comments below.

Market-Driven Patient Engagement is just one of the trends we explore in our new guide, The Definitive Guide to Connected Health 2016: 10 Trends You Need to Know. Download the guide to see where this trend falls and to discover the other Connected Health trends healthcare executives must be aware of. In the guide we also provide insights to help organizations not only survive – but thrive – in the age of consumer-driven healthcare.

How healthcare can use the leading customer experience platform to deliver the ideal patient experience.

If you are in the healthcare business – data, and how it is utilized, is likely something you face weekly. For that matter, you may have even read some of our own Healthcare Industry Trends. Healthcare is rich with patient data, and there are many visions of how it should used going forward. In this article I am not going to predict the “what” and “when,” but rather, show HOW a specific aspect of the patient journey can be improved with meaningful data.
Whether on a secure patient portal, a provider’s corporate website, or a specific practice’s education site, the experience should be focused on the patient and not the way the business is organized. While I realize it’s somewhat taboo to say so, patients are consumers. Outside of their healthcare experience, they are shopping, comparing, and purchasing as consumers. And that experience that they traverse everyday (as an average consumer) affects their expectations across all journeys. Amazon, and similar customer experience leaders have set the bar, and just because you are not selling electronics, stand mixers or the latest fashion does not exclude you from providing a streamlined user journey.
Delivering on this expected norm, or even surprising patients with advanced personalization is something the healthcare industry can glean from leading retailers. This relevance drives trust, and that trust is certainly a commanding emotion when making an important health decision no matter where they are in the process.

Source: McKinsey & Co., 2014

Here are 5 Ways Sitecore can deliver on a world-class patient journey.

1. A one-to-one view of your patients’ journeys: As each patient enters your site, Sitecore will track their journey
   without the need of any tracking script. This is not a sample of visitors, this is every visitor, and every interaction. With a little planning and very minimal effort, you can score pages to weight their importance; A form completion page – 100 points, sign-up for newsletter – 50 points, social link click – 10 points, as examples. With this simple scoring in place you can start to see which users are taking more “valuable” journeys and start to see patters and work to provide better paths to the higher value pages. These values can then also be associated with campaigns.

2. Speaking of campaigns: With ease, you can set up campaigns and group them for easy management and detailed reporting. Track keyword campaigns, create and email campaigns, social, print and so on. You can even create campaigns that are built off of a certain behavior or set of activities. With these in place, you can track by campaign and campaign group and continue to define a picture of what is working and what is not (for refinement).

3. Start to personalize content: With the picture I painted above, you can start to define your users. How do you show content for a patient, how do you show it for a healthcare professional? This can start simple: change banners; show different classes to convert to a sign up; change content for return visits or logged in vs. logged out. These grow over time to a level of sophistication that will ultimately result in delivering a relevant, connected experience for each patient, every time.

4. Drive engagement plans: Create simple to very complex rules based engagement plans that automate processes and simultaneously deliver a better patient experience based off of evolving data. A certain value of page score could send a trigger to change page content – say, a newsletter signup form. Enrolling in a class could alert a nurse through email. Collected data could be pushed to another internal system. The possibilities are endless and can by layered. The questions will be: What does your healthcare business want to do to improve efficiency and how will it affect your patient experience?

5. The single point of truth: Your patients’ journeys will evolve over time and your view of each user will develop in their xFile. This clear vision of each users’ experience in time can include: a timeline of activity including mobile, or desktop; what outcomes occurred; what campaigns were triggered; what was the source of each interaction; what type of user is this and what are they most interested in – just to name a few. All of this information can be synced with other systems, resulting in a fully connected patient journey.

 All of this takes time, and admittedly, I am providing a quick look at some of the potential. Importantly, we understand the steps that can be taken to crawl, walk, run and ultimately fly with Sitecore. There are best practices to make for quick wins that will also inspire your organization’s journey to a better patient experience and a deeper understanding of each individual user. If you are attending #HIMMS16, stop by and say, “Hi” to Perficient in the Microsoft booth – #3832, where we can provide more depth and discussion around business pain points, and we can talk about how we could help you deliver on the ideal patient journey with Sitecore. Learn more: http://www.himssconference.org/
 

We are all aware of the enormous impact Government regulations have had on healthcare and while they are in place to improve healthcare, in some cases they may be hindering progress. For example, to meet Meaningful Use requirements healthcare providers must provide electronic health records to their patients and for most organizations the vehicle for doing so is a patient portal. Many organizations have implemented patient portals that are “good enough” to meet the Meaningful Use requirements in order to receive incentives from the Government. That being said, there are healthcare organizations that are looking beyond the Meaningful Use requirements and want to implement a patient portal that empowers patients and provides a vehicle for communication and engagement.

Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) is one of those organizations. HCA is the nation’s largest provider of healthcare services with more than 165 hospitals and 115 surgery centers in 20 states and England. They selected Perficient to develop and deliver their MyHealthONE patient portal because they wanted to provide an enhanced patient experience by offering additional services that go beyond the Meaningful Use criteria.

IBM WebSphere Portal provides a platform to deliver a single patient experience that integrates patient data from a variety of clinical systems and allows patients to manage their health from anywhere. The result is an intuitive and evolving system that meets the needs of facilities, clinicians and patients.

In addition to meeting an important patient satisfaction goal through features like find a doctor, schedule an appointment, bill pay and register for a class, the MyHealthOne patient portal also helps HCA meet a major requirement of the federal government’s ongoing Meaningful Use criteria around electronic record keeping and access. The new portal is a big part of the personalized care path that HCA is creating.

Learn more about the new patient portal here.

Follow me @KateDTuttle

Diagram from – http://www.hcatodayblog.com/2015/05/08/doorway-to-better-care/

Most industry changes leading to patient data access came by way of Meaningful Use. In the future, changes in the patient portal market will be driven by a series of marketplace dynamics. What does the market think of patient engagement? For the answer to this question it is best to refer to a report by Frost & Sullivan entitled “U.S. Patient Portal Market for Hospitals and Physicians: Overview and Outlook, 2012-2017\0x2033.

“The need to fully engage patients as a member of the care team is fundamentally about encouraging individuals to become more involved with their healthcare, so they will be motivated to make behavioral changes that can positively impact their health status. That need will only grow as the healthcare system moves towards accountable care and value-based reimbursement. The importance of this movement cannot be underestimated.”

While it is predicted that hospitals will continue to make steady progress towards MU2 attestation, they will receive low patient adoption rates, which will force the industry to rethink patient engagement. Here are 7 features the market wants to see in your patient portal:

• Telehealth that moves beyond the virtual visit
• Dynamic scheduling:
• Social collaboration
• Gamification and serious games
• Avatars for personalized health coaching
• Health information exchange across diverse care settings
• Integration of clinical and financial data

Analysts have suggested that by the end of 2019, 66% of health systems will offer digital self-scheduling and 64% of patients will book appointments digitally. This will result in $3.2 billion in value in cost reduction. It’s estimated that 75% of all hospital readmissions are preventable.

We live in a world of information, everywhere we turn someone is collecting information about us. The technology advancements over the last 10 years are mind-boggling, but new technology is usually escorted by apprehension as our privacy continues to diminish and security is anything but secure. From cookies on the internet to a basket analysis at the supermarket, “big brother” is always watching.

The healthcare industry is no different. Healthcare organizations are surrounded by data: clinical, operational and financial; internal and external; structured and unstructured. There is so much information that healthcare providers don’t know what to do with it. The problem with healthcare is not a lack of information. The problem is healthcare organizations often have disparate systems that lack continuity. The absence of interoperability within IT infrastructures ultimately means that the right information is not available to the right people at the right time. Healthcare organizations can have all the information in the world, but if the information is not cohesive and can’t be used efficiently to improve clinical outcomes than information really doesn’t matter.

In order for healthcare organizations to improve outcomes, communication between systems is paramount. Despite industry standards such as EDI/X12, HL7 and CDA, information delivery is not effective. Most healthcare organizations understand the importance of untangling the interoperability web, but those same organizations don’t know where to begin.

Government regulations such as Meaningful Use Stage 2 (MU2) are putting additional pressure on healthcare organizations to improve the quality of care, coordination of care and population health management. A strong interoperability backbone that provides system connectivity is the key to attaining MU2. Interoperability transforms information into key insights that drive better clinical outcomes and improve the lives of individuals and communities.

Do you understand the importance of interoperability but not sure where to start? Perficient will be teaming up with technology partners IBM and Oracle to bring you 2 complimentary webinars:

Tackle Healthcare Interoperability Challenges and Improve Transitions of Care
Thursday, September 25^th @ 12 CT
Learn More and Register

Engage Patients, Reduce Manual Processes and Drive Key Insights with Interoperability
Tuesday, October 2^nd @ 2 CT
Learn More and Register

In a recent chat with the VP of a large health system, I learned what keeps him up at night. His organization, like many across the nation, has invested mountains of time and money in Meaningful Use Stage 2. Like most health systems (all but 11% says research groups like KLAS) they chose to invest in the patient portal modules available through the EHR vendor. This is largely because most Meaningful Use patient portal decisions are being made by IT, as opposed to business. At the top of the list in IT decision making criteria is integration with EHR. So, VPs like my new friend at this large health system are able to cross off the features required via Meaningful Use quite easy. All except one…

They are having a heck of a time getting patients to actually adopt the patient portal technology.

It appears as though the “if we build it they will come” concept hasn’t quite held true in the case of patient portal. In fact, the statistics are rather staggering. Recent research discussed in the HealthData Management article entitled “Patient Portals Not Yet Go-To Platform for Patients” reveals:

• Almost half of patients don’t even know if their physician has a patient portal
• 11 percent are confident their physician “does not” offer one

And here is the kicker for a recovering marketer like myself:

• Less than half of those surveyed–49.2 percent–report actually being shown a patient portal by their primary care physician either during a visit or outside a visit

And why is this keeping folks like my VP friend awake at night? Well, first and foremost it is because healthcare providers like him are fans of patient engagement and want to provide patients with the tools they need to stay healthy. Taking it a step further, Meaningful Use Stage 2 is a financial incentive. The criteria for getting those incentive dollars are not met when you build a patient portal. They are met when a critical population of patients adopts the technology. Early results are in, and patients are not adopting.

So, what’s the the underlying problem here? Well, it’s multifaceted, but much of the error falls in building patient portals that are not user centric. he user, the patient, is and should be the center of our universe. However, it is oftentimes not the department of IT, the department largely in charge of Meaningful Use, that invests in stores of knowledge like user experience. I’ve also been met with many blank stares across conference room tables when I ask healthcare provider portal teams about campaigns their marketing team have created to drive attention to the portal and journey maps that have been created across their patient digital experience to drive patients into the portal. In my opinion, Meaningful Use is one of the biggest marketing fails I’ve seen in my career thus far. There is not alignment between IT and the rest of the organization on the measures needed to drive patient engagement. In my opinion, which has now been validated by this research, a campaign that does not also consider physician adoption of portal technology is a campaign waiting to fail. If the physicians are not using it, then their patients will not either.

This is why I began the dialogue a few of months back on what the market says you need in your patient portal. The market, which in reality is simply cumulative actions of patient populations, is the most important input into the creation of a successful patient portal. You can see some of the components of a user centric patient portal in that series:

• Telehealth Beyond the Virtual Visit
• Dynamic Scheduling
• Gamification & Serious Games
• Avatars for Personalized Coaching
• Integration of Data
• HIE Across Diverse Care Settings